- Husband found guilty of ordering wife’s murder
The sentencing of a St Ann businessman and gas distributor accused of ordering the murder of his wife and another man accused of carrying out the killing was delayed in the Home Circuit Court on Thursday, April 21.
Bertram Clarke, 64, and his co-accused, Arthur Robinson are the men who were found guilty of murder by a 12-member jury on March 15. The trial was dubbed as a “marathon trial.”
According to attorney Oswest Senior Smith, who represented Bertram Clarke in the matter, sentencing was delayed as there was a miscommunication about the time for sentencing.
The matter is now set for sentencing on Wednesday, April 27.
On the night of October 26, 2007, 74-year-old Floris Clarke was found with her head bashed in and her throat slashed at the home she shared with her husband Bertram, in Watt Town, St Ann.
Bertram Clarke, who was 56 at the time of the incident, was eighteen years his wife’s junior.
In a case that the North Coast Times initially reported on after the murder and when the matter first appeared before the courts,
two juveniles at the time, one 14 years old and the other 15 from the same high school in St Ann, along with Clarke were taken into custody for the murder.
Police had described it as a case in which Mr Clarke ordered the murder of his wife and arranged to pay the schoolboys $60,000 to carry out the act. They said that Mr Clarke had become angry with his wife who had recently returned from England to live with him.
On Friday evening, October 26, 2007, the act was allegedly carried out by the two teenage boys. On the instruction of Mr Clarke, they broke into the Clarkes’ house in the small district of Chewmagna, Watt Town where they stabbed and slashed Mrs Clarke with a knife. Mr Clarke was not at home at the time of the act.
CHURCH MEETING
Mrs Clarke was left for dead at the house. However, when Mr Clarke called police and said he had come home to find his wife dead, police found she had not yet died and took her first to St Ann’s Bay Hospital from where she was transferred to Kingston Public Hospital.
By the following day (Saturday, October 27, 2007), police took Mr Clarke into custody. Mrs Clarke died Sunday and within days a link was established to the teens.
Police arrested them and said at the time that they gave statements confessing to murdering Mrs Clarke. They took the police to the murder weapon, a knife they had thrown into a pit latrine at the Watt Town School. They told the police that Mr Clarke had promised them $60,000 to murder his wife.
They should have received the money on the Sunday after, when they met Mr Clarke at church. But the police had already arrested him so the church meeting and pay off did not take place.
The trial commenced on November 9, 2015 before Justice Gloria Smith in the Home Circuit in Kingston.
The case had several adjournments in December and ended finally on Tuesday, March 15 after 15-weeks.
The crown, led evidence from 17 witnesses that Clarke’s husband, Bertram Clarke conspired with two schoolboys to kill his wife.
One of these boys, Arthur Robinson, who was also from the community of Watt Town, was Bertram Clarke’s co-accused in the case. The second schoolboy, Emmanuel Newland, had previously pleaded guilty in July 2011 to the murder and is serving a prison sentence of 15 years.
